Seeding, Evolutionary Growth and Reseeding: Constructing, Capturing and Evolving Knowledge in Domain-Oriented Design Environments

We live in a world characterized by evolution—that is, by ongoing processes of development, formation, and growth in both natural and human-created systems. Biology tells us that complex, natural systems are not created all at once but must instead evolve over time. We are becoming increasingly aware that evolutionary processes are ubiquitous and critical for technological innovations as well. This is particularly true for complex software systems because these systems do not necessarily exist in a technological context alone but instead are embedded within dynamic human organizations.The Center for LifeLong Learning and Design (L3D) at the University of Colorado has been involved in research on software design and other design domains for more than a decade. We understand software design as an evolutionary process in which system requirements and functionality are determined through an iterative process of collaboration among multiple stakeholders, rather than being completely specified before system development occurs. Our research focuses on the following claims about software systems embedded within dynamic human organizations: (1) they must evolve because they cannot be completely designed prior to use, (2) they must evolve to some extent at the hands of the users, and (3) they must be designed for evolution.Our theoretical work builds upon our existing knowledge of design processes and focuses on a software process model and architecture specifically for systems that must evolve. Our theories are instantiated and assessed through the development and evolution of domain-oriented design environments (DODEs)—software systems that support design activities within particular domains and that are built specifically to evolve.     

Developing a quantitative intelligent system for implementing concurrent engineering design

This research focuses on the development of a quantitative intelligent system for implementing concurrent engineering design. The paper first discusses the task of concurrent engineering design and the basic requirements for conducting integrated concurrent engineering design. The proposed quantitative intelligent system approach combines qualitative reasoning, based upon design and manufacturing knowledge, and quantitative evaluation and optimization, conducted using design information and manufacturing data generated in the knowledge-based reasoning. The method allows considerations on non-operating principle aspects of a product to be incorporated into the design phase, such as manufacturing, maintenance, service, recycle, etc., with an emphasis on production costs. The proposed method serves as a convenient software tool for gathering information required in the concurrent engineering design process and integrates tasks from different parts of the product development life cycle, particularly function design, manufacturability analysis and production cost estimation. A prototype software system is developed based upon this method using Smalltalk-80. In the prototype system, concurrent engineering design is carried out by: (1) describing and representing design requirements; (2) generating feasible design candidates and evaluating their design functions; (3) representing design geometry; (4) finding the associated production processes and predicting the production costs of each feasible design; and (5) identifying the costeffective design that satisfies given design requirements and requires minimum production costs.     

A QFD-based method to support SMEs in benchmarking co-design tools

Efficient collaborative product design is crucial for extended enterprises willing to develop complex products pursuing a short time to market. However, successful collaborative product design depends on the ability to effectively manage and share engineering knowledge and data throughout the entire product development process. Co-design software platforms aim to facilitate cooperation in distributed teams. In the context of Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) the advanced co-design software implementation to support the supply chain is not a trivial task. SMEs have peculiar characteristics such as flexibility, ICT skills and financial resources, which are difficult to be integrated within a structured design network. This paper presents a method to define and evaluate a co-design platform dedicated to SMEs in the mechanical product field. System architecture is defined by applying suitable metrics based on collaborative process characteristics in order to assess functionality performance of the available tools. Benchmarking is based on different levels of collaboration recognized in the typical product development process in SMEs. Correlation between process metrics, software functionalities and specific collaboration requirements is managed by adopting Quality Function Deployment (QFD) techniques. A practical case study allows the robustness of the proposed method to be verified and the main advantages and future developments to be discussed.     

A reference architecture for scientific virtual laboratories

Recent advances in the IT can be applied to properly support certain complex requirements in the scientific and engineering domains. In experimental sciences, for instance, researchers should be assisted with conducting their complex scientific experimentation and supporting their collaboration with other scientists. The main requirements identified in such domains include the management of large data sets, distributed collaboration support, and high-performance issues, among others. The virtual laboratory project initiated at the University of Amsterdam aims at the development of a hardware and software reference architecture, and an open, flexible, and configurable laboratory framework to enable scientists and engineers with working on their experimentation problems, while making optimum use of modern information technology approaches. This paper describes the current stage of design of a reference architecture for this scientific virtual laboratory, and focuses further on the cooperative information management component of this architecture, and exemplifying its application to experimentation domain of biology.     

基于Web的产品配置设计系统体系研究

对产品配置设计全过程进行了研究，在分析现有产品配置设计系统的基础上，结合当前客户定制要求与协同制造技术的发展，对基于Web的、使客户能真正参与协同产品配置设计的系统体系进行了初步探索，并提出了实现该体系的技术路线。     

On the architecture of a human-centered CAD agent system

With an increasing role of computers in the design process, a strong foundation of the basic principles for building CAD systems is extremely necessary. This work describes the architecture of a CAD system from the perspective of the capabilities required to build a human centered CAD system. These capabilities have been reported as task-sharing, communication, transparency, design rationale and cognition. Existing systems for engineering design have been analyzed from the perspective of these capabilities and an agent-based system previously reported in literature has been extended to a new architecture to support three of the aforementioned capabilities. The proposed architecture is an amalgamation of multi-agent systems, the ACT-R cognitive architecture and fuzzy rule based Petri nets. The salient advantage of this architecture is that it focuses on the capabilities of design rationale, transparency and cognition together—something which has been missing from all the current works in literature and is unique to the domain of application of the software system, which in this case is engineering design. The other capabilities namely task sharing and communication can be incorporated from lessons learnt from human–computer interaction research. The effectiveness of the proposed architecture is demonstrated by a hypothetical design case along with its implementation.     

多人实时协同设计在虚拟家装系统中的研究与实现

本文主要介绍了基于计算机支持下的协同技术中的多人实时协同的算法和理论,以及多人协同模块在虚拟家装系统中的具体实现,令分布在不同地域的普通用户在同一时间浏览、设计同一个户型的任意部分,提高了虚拟家装系统的设计效率,增强了用户对软件的应用体验,带来了巨大的经济效益。     

Automated generation of multiphysics simulation models to support multidisciplinary design optimization

To ensure a consistent design representation for serving multidisciplinary analysis, this research study proposes an intelligent modeling system to automatically generate multiphysics simulation models to support multidisciplinary design optimization processes by using a knowledge based engineering approach. A key element of this system is a multiphysics information model (MIM), which integrates the design and simulation knowledge from multiple engineering domains. The intelligent modeling system defines classes with attributes to represent various aspects of physical entities. Moreover, it uses functions to capture the non-physical information, such as control architecture, simulation test maneuvers and simulation procedures. The challenge of system coupling and the interactions among the disciplines are taken into account during the process of knowledge acquisition. Depending on the domain requirements, the intelligent modeling system extracts the required knowledge from the MIM and uses this first to instantiate submodels and second to construct the multiphysics simulation model by combining all submodels. The objective of this research is to reduce the time and effort for modeling complex systems and to provide a consistent and concurrent design environment to support multidisciplinary design optimization. The development of an unstable and unmanned aerial vehicle, a multirotor UAV, is selected as test case. The intelligent modeling system is demonstrated by modeling thirty-thousand multirotor UAV designs with different topologies and by ensuring the automatic development of a consistent control system dedicated for each individual design. Moreover, the resulting multiphysics simulation model of the multirotor UAV is validated by comparing with the flight data of an actual quadrotor UAV. The results show that the multiphysics simulation model matches test data well and indicate that high fidelity models can be generated with the automatic model generation process.     

网络化产品协同设计的理论与实践

网络化产品协同设计是实施先进制造的重要支撑技术,该文在分析其研究现状和特点的基础上,提出了基于中介代理的联邦式协同机制和基于约束松弛的协同递归式设计模式,为分布式协同设计的有效运作和基于知识的协同求解提供了一种理论依据。设计并开发了相应的网络化协同设计支持系统——CoDesignSpace,给出了系统的体系结构和实施方法。     

A distributed and interactive system to integrated design and simulation for collaborative product development

The goal of applying collaborative product development in industry has raised the need to develop software tools supporting system integration and group collaboration. Current methods and tools mainly focus on the collaborative creation of design components and assemblies. However, few of them support the collaborative work in developing simulation models so that proposed design concepts and solutions can be evaluated by integrating expertise from several disciplines. The purpose of this research is to develop a distributed and interactive system on which designers and experts can work together to create, integrate and run simulations for engineering design. To develop such a system, a number of issues, e.g. effectiveness and efficiency of modeling work, the re-use of models, interaction and cooperation, accuracy of simulation, collaborative operation on models, etc., need to be addressed. This paper describes an open architecture to developing simulations for engineering design in a distributed and collaborative environment, identifies a set of key issues raised in this architecture, and presents the techniques employed in our solution.     

An intelligent assistant for requirements validation

The process of determining user requirements for software systems is often plagued with uncertainty, ambiguity, and inconsistency. Rapid prototyping offers an iterative approach to requirements engineering that can be used to alleviate some of the problems with communication and understanding. Since the systems development process is characterized by changing requirements and assumptions, involving multiple stakeholders with often differing viewpoints, it is beneficial to capture the justifications for the decisions in the development process in a structured manner. Thisdesign rationale captured during requirements engineering can be used in conjunction with the rapid prototyping process to support various stakeholders involved in systems development. CAPS (the Computer Aided Prototyping System) has been built to help software engineers rapidly construct prototypes of proposed software systems. REMAP (Representation and MAintenance of Process knowledge) provides a conceptual model and mechanisms to represent and reason with (design) rationale knowledge. In this paper, we describe how in the context of evolving requirements, the CAPS system augmented with REMAP helps firm up software requirements through iterative negotiations via examination of executable prototypes and reasoning with design rationale knowledge.     

Cloud-based design and manufacturing: A new paradigm in digital manufacturing and design innovation

Cloud-based design manufacturing (CBDM) refers to a service-oriented networked product development model in which service consumers are enabled to configure, select, and utilize customized product realization resources and services ranging from computer-aided engineering software to reconfigurable manufacturing systems. An ongoing debate on CBDM in the research community revolves around several aspects such as definitions, key characteristics, computing architectures, communication and collaboration processes, crowdsourcing processes, information and communication infrastructure, programming models, data storage, and new business models pertaining to CBDM. One question, in particular, has often been raised: is cloud-based design and manufacturing actually a new paradigm, or is it just “old wine in new bottles”? To answer this question, we discuss and compare the existing definitions for CBDM, identify the essential characteristics of CBDM, define a systematic requirements checklist that an idealized CBDM system should satisfy, and compare CBDM to other relevant but more traditional collaborative design and distributed manufacturing systems such as web- and agent-based design and manufacturing systems. To justify the conclusion that CBDM can be considered as a new paradigm that is anticipated to drive digital manufacturing and design innovation, we present the development of a smart delivery drone as an idealized CBDM example scenario and propose a corresponding CBDM system architecture that incorporates CBDM-based design processes, integrated manufacturing services, information and supply chain management in a holistic sense.     

Synthesis of probabilistic models for quality-of-service software engineering

An increasingly used method for the engineering of software systems with strict quality-of-service (QoS) requirements involves the synthesis and verification of probabilistic models for many alternative architectures and instantiations of system parameters. Using manual trial-and-error or simple heuristics for this task often produces suboptimal models, while the exhaustive synthesis of all possible models is typically intractable. The EvoChecker search-based software engineering approach presented in our paper addresses these limitations by employing evolutionary algorithms to automate the model synthesis process and to significantly improve its outcome. EvoChecker can be used to synthesise the Pareto-optimal set of probabilistic models associated with the QoS requirements of a system under design, and to support the selection of a suitable system architecture and configuration. EvoChecker can also be used at runtime, to drive the efficient reconfiguration of a self-adaptive software system. We evaluate EvoChecker on several variants of three systems from different application domains, and show its effectiveness and applicability.     

Collaborative conceptual design: A large software project case study

During software development, the activities of requirements analysis, functional specification, and architectural design all require a team of developers to converge on a common vision of what they are developing. There have been remarkably few studies of conceptual design during real projects. In this paper, we describe a detailed field study of a large industrial software project. We observed the development team's conceptual design activities for three months with follow-up observations and discussions over the following eight months. In this paper, we emphasize the organization of the project and how patterns of collaboration affected the team's convergence on a common vision. Three observations stand out: First, convergence on a common vision was not only painfully slow but was punctuated by several reorientations of direction; second, the design process seemed to be inherently forgetful, involving repeated resurfacing of previously discussed issues; finally, a conflict of values persisted between team members responsible for system development and those responsible for overseeing the development process. These findings have clear implications for collaborative support tools and process interventions.     

Cognitive,social, and environmental attributes of distributed engineering collaboration: A review and proposed model of collaboration

The objective of this article is to review the attributes that influence distributed collaboration groups engaged in engineering tasks in order to guide the research into the development of new tools and methods to support engineering groups. Three comprehensive areas of literature that describe the cognitive, social, and environmental factors influencing collaboration are covered including task characteristics, collaborative technology, and group/individual development. A model is proposed that can contribute to the understanding of the engineering collaboration process, distributed group interaction, and the role of the task within this environment. The relationships between the attributes included in the model are hypothesized to affect the distributed collaboration process. This article discusses the attributes and suggests that further research is required to validate the model's relationships. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

基于云边协同的微电网自动控制系统

微电网及分布式能源的数量、规模快速发展,当前系统无法满足海量相关数据采集、存储、分析计算需求；为适应多微电网控制的高并发、高可靠性的处理要求,提出了基于云边协同的微电网自动控制系统；基于Docker容器技术优化配置云边计算资源；设计了基于云边协同的微电网自动控制系统总体架构,对云边协同功能及主要数据流进行了详细说明；进一步分析了其中微电网控制及能量管理等核心功能及其数据处理需求,提出了云边协同架构下的计算分析任务调度策略,基于带宽资源对迁移任务数据流进行调度,兼顾任务时限要求和服务器的负荷均衡；最后通过运行实例对提出的微电网自动控制系统功能及优越性进行有效性验证,所提系统通过架构、功能和任务调度策略满足了多微电网的控制要求。     

A model-driven software engineering workflow and tool architecture for servitised manufacturing

Modern manufacturing businesses increasingly engage in servitisation, by offering advanced services along with physical products, and creating “product–service systems”. Information Technology infrastructures, and especially software, are a critical part of modern service provision. However, software development in this context has not been investigated and there are no development methods or tools specifically adapted to the task of creating software for servitised businesses in general, or manufacturing in particular. In this paper, we define the requirements for software engineering in servitised manufacturing. Based on these, we describe a model-driven software engineering workflow for servitised manufacturing, supporting both structural and behavioural modelling of the service system. Furthermore, we elaborate on the architecture of an appropriate model-driven Integrated Development Environment (IDE). The proposed workflow and a prototype implementation of the IDE were evaluated in a set of industrial pilots, demonstrating improved communication and collaboration between participants in the software engineering process.     

PAVED: Pareto Front Visualization for Engineering Design

Design problems in engineering typically involve a large solution space and several potentially conflicting criteria. Selecting a compromise solution is often supported by optimization algorithms that compute hundreds of Pareto-optimal solutions, thus informing a decision by the engineer. However, the complexity of evaluating and comparing alternatives increases with the number of criteria that need to be considered at the same time. We present a design study on Pareto front visualization to support engineers in applying their expertise and subjective preferences for selection of the most-preferred solution. We provide a characterization of data and tasks from the parametric design of electric motors. The requirements identified were the basis for our development of PAVED, an interactive parallel coordinates visualization for exploration of multi-criteria alternatives. We reflect on our user-centered design process that included iterative refinement with real data in close collaboration with a domain expert as well as a summative evaluation in the field. The results suggest a high usability of our visualization as part of a real-world engineering design workflow. Our lessons learned can serve as guidance to future visualization developers targeting multi-criteria optimization problems in engineering design or alternative domains.     

基于CMM的软件过程导航系统的设计与实现

介绍如何根据CMM的体系结构,在Internet网络环境下设计并实现一个能够被异地多用户并发访问的导航系统.通过分析CMM模型的体系结构,成功地设计并建立了一个软件过程导航数据库,该数据库可以根据实际需要进行扩展.用户能够通过浏览器访问该导航系统,查询CMM的框架内容和组织机构实施各级别的详细内容,并可以通过查看国内外组织实施CMM的相关实例,达到为用户进行导航的目的.为软件企业有效地控制软件过程、提高开发效率和改进软件产品质量提供有效的途径.